Experimental Validation of Non-Linear Empirical Model to Simulate the Photovoltaic Production Under Semi-Arid Climate. Case Study of Benguerir, Morocco

Nowadays, the investments in large-scale photovoltaic power projects is increasing around the world and more especially in the MENA region. To encourage investors to install more PV capacities, it's important to provide guaranties on the benefits in term of production especially in harsh and semi-arid climates. For this reason, modeling of photovoltaic performance in such conditions is required to predict accurately the plants energy yield. The aim of this study is to adapt a non-linear empirical model to simulate the photovoltaic production under semi-arid climate. The new developed model represents the output power of the PV module as a function of in-plane irradiance and ambient temperature, and a number of semi-empirical coefficients determined by fitting the outdoor measured data. The model has been validated using one year of high accurate measured data at ground level of a polycrystalline module at Green Energy Park research facility. Results of this study show that the proposed model is a good approach to predict the output photovoltaic power under semi-arid climate with an hourly nRMSE of 3.1% in comparison to ground measurements.